Suspense writer Byrd (Target of Opportunity, Finders Weepers, etc.) shifts from familiar turf for a well-founded but listless historical saga about Thomas Jefferson in Paris during the French Revolution, depicting the author of the Declaration of Independence as a man whose actions ran counter to his principles. William Short, Jefferson's secretary in Paris while he served there as ambassador from 1784-89, is a devoted assistant to his fellow Virginian, already an American hero. Taken on because of his linguistic abilities, Short encounters and is awed by luminaries such as Ben Franklin and John Adams, but his way with French ladies gives him more to handle than notes and correspondence. He witnesses aghast, however, as Jefferson—chaste and correct after the death of his beloved wife several years earlier—falls like a ton of bricks for a blond beauty in the company of her prominent artist husband. For Maria Cosway, the attraction is mutual, and their liaison sets Parisian tongues wagging, but the consequences are far more severe when Short also forms an attachment with the young wife of an aging French duke. The Ambassador, who espouses emancipation while retaining slaves himself, disapproves of Short's affair even as he pursues Maria; as the Revolution self-destructs, Jefferson manages to disentangle himself from scandal, while his assistant remains mired in it. Finally, with blood running in the streets, Jefferson returns home, assured of greater glories to come, but leaving Short to fend for himself without any hope of succeeding him. A pivotal historical moment, but feebly reenacted, with an unfortunate tendency to substitute posturing for plotting—even the illicit relationships are more tepid than torrid.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-553-09470-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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